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#Parents wise up about Critical Race Theory : Stepman

#Parents wise up about Critical Race Theory : Stepman

According to “free-speech advocates,” a dark and sinister conspiracy threatens our country’s public schools: Curriculum transparency.

NBC News has published a lengthy exposé on how parents, citizens and state lawmakers are demanding more transparency and seeking an end to the teaching of critical race theory and extreme gender ideology in public schools.

The nerve of those people.

The piece starts off on the wrong foot, with a distortion of what opposition to CRT in schools is about. Tyler Kingkade, an NBC News national reporter, begins by saying that Republican governors and lawmakers have “fought to limit discussions of race in public schools.”

Opposition to CRT is not about limiting discussions of race or history. It’s about preventing educators from foisting a particular ideology about race — one premised on the idea that some races are inherently oppressors and others oppressed — on students.

Teaching about history and current events is good; preaching a kind of neo-segregationism to students is bad. Most parents understand that.

Don’t you dare ask!

As the NBC article notes, Christopher Rufo, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, and others have used public documents to expose thate fact that CRT and similar ideas are being peddled in countless public and private institutions, including K-12 schools.

As Rufo has said, those who stand in opposition to this movement have barely attempted to defend CRT on its merits. Instead, they denounce transparency and parents who aren’t going along with the program. In many other cases they’ve simply denied that CRT exists in schools.

Parent holds sign about child's identity
A parent protests against CRT outside of the New Mexico Public Education Department with signs.
AP

Oh, but don’t you dare try to find out if it does!

We hear a lot of talk these days from a certain crowd about “democracy” and how it’s always one vote or election away from disappearing forever.

Yet how are these attempts to decrease transparency and parent oversight in schools anything but anti-democratic?

The sudden surge in engagement of parents and concerned citizens across the country in typically sleepy school-board elections is a sign that democracy is alive and well.

The American people have always had a remarkable capacity for self-government and local organization, which the famed French observer of American life, Alexis de Tocqueville, catalogued in “Democracy in America” in the early 19th century. Let’s hope our schools still teach about him.

What’s happening is Americans are waking up to the fact that their taxpayer-supported local public schools often promote ideas and values that run counter to their most deeply-held beliefs.

What these so-called free-speech advocates NBC News profiles are effectively saying is that school boards, teachers unions and the vast education establishment have some kind of inherent right to push objectionable ideas on children in opposition to the will of the people.

They really do see the public schools as a sacred and protected conduit to promote progressive ideas to children across the country. If “conservatives,” those icky, deplorable people who object to children’s books about sex change being foisted on elementary-school students, decide they want to have a say in this whole process, then democracy be damned.

More choice is needed

This may make a lot of sense to segments of the American ruling elite who think the institutions are democracy itself.

More choice is needed

It’s clear, however, that plenty of Americans still cling to old-fashioned self-government and are rightly horrified when — for instance — failed Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe said the quiet part out loud.

Terry McAuliffe
Former Governor Terry McAuliffe, left, gestures as Republican challenger, Glenn Youngkin, listens during a debate.
AP

“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” McAuliffe said in a debate with now-Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

“L’état, c’est moi” — the state, it’s me — is the message Virginians heard, and McAuliffe went down in a stunning defeat.

If anything, the battle over CRT and schools demonstrates how American institutions have been corrupted to obey insular, progressive activists and teachers unions now wedded entirely to left-wing ideology.

Transparency is giving parents and Americans of all backgrounds insight into how this all works, and many are demanding changes.

This includes a removal of pernicious curriculuma as well as measures that would provide more school choice for parents who wish to take their children out of a system that’s failed or doesn’t uphold their values.

They have every right to do this.

As Nora says in one of my favorite Westerns, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” in this country, the people are the “boss.”

Jarrett Stepman is a columnist at The Daily Signal.

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